Australia’s Northern Territory: Is Slaughter The Solution, Or Should Man Just Leave?

Did you hear the one about the man who didn’t like his blue pumps? So disgusted was he with the color that he cut off his legs and bled to death.

I know, as a joke it’s either sick or bad or both. However it’s not too bad an analogy for the conclusions the chaps at the Charles Darwin University School for Environmental Research (SER) are reaching.

[Darwin, for those not familiar with Australian geography, is the capital of the Northern Territory in Australia, the harshest region in the country].

• » See also: Mistaken Identity: Hunters Kill Endangered Pygmy Hippo
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Is Slaughtering Animals Is The Solution?

For over a year, SER has been arguing that a cull of the Northern Territory’s 830,000 feral animals should take place.  They even got a spot recently on Australia’s ABC channel.

The environmental justification for this includes wiping out 150,000 wild buffalo and a similar number of camels which, as ruminants, are estimated to produce over 4% of the Northern Territory’s greenhouse gas emissions.

SER envisages aerial missions in helicopters to shoot the feral wildlife. This would require a tenfold increase in funding which, in a typically brash Aussie way, SER says can be recouped from the selling of carbon credits freed by the cull.

Man’s Impact Is The Issue

However, there’s a bit of slight of hand going on here. 4% of the total emissions is a sizeable chunk, but given that the Northern Territory is a major cattle-ranching centre there could be other ways to decrease GHG emissions.

For example, there is no abattoir in the state so any beef consumed there has to be shipped out for slaughter and then shipped back in for butchery and consumption.

Without a trace or irony, one of SER’s leading professors, Stephen Garnett agrees that “the public hasn’t done a lot to change their behaviour when it comes to climate change”.

SER research also shows that people living in the Northern Territory emit twice as much carbon as other Australians and require nearly four times the global average of land to support themselves.

How about doing something to change those figures first, rather than running off and killing a bunch of wild animals?

Or Should Man Just Leave?

Or perhaps .. perhaps people shouldn’t be living in the Northern Territory at all. Afterall, if the climate is so scorching as to require 24hour air conditioning for human habitation, perhaps the best solution is just to pack up and leave?

Sustainability is not just about tweaking our lifestyles, replacing gas with biofuels or the suchlike. It’s about changing our fundamental behaviour to ensure we live in an ecological and environmentally supportive way.

If Man cannot live sustainably in the Northern Territory, then rather than slaughtering a few hundred thousand animals for economic and regulatory reasons, we should just go.

That would be the best solution for everyone.

^{Picture Credit: SLAF - Sri Lanka Air Force by Rio-X from flickr under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.}

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